ncipated from the conditions imposed upon
him by the peculiar composition of his native English. The concrete
significance of the Romanic words becomes apparent to him, and they
acquire energy and vitality. The expression dolent may thus satisfy the
student familiar with Italian, because it calls up in his mind, through
the medium of its equivalent dolente, the same associations which the
latter calls up in the mind of the Italian himself. [41] But this power
of appreciating thoroughly the beauties of a foreign tongue is in the
last degree an acquired taste,--as much so as the taste for olives and
kirschenwasser to the carnal palate. It is only by long and profound
study that we can thus temporarily vest ourselves, so to speak, with
a French or Italian consciousness in exchange for our English one. The
literary epicure may keenly relish such epithets as dolent; but the
common English reader, who loves plain fare, can hardly fail to be
startled by it. To him it savours of the grotesque; and if there is any
one thing especially to be avoided in the interpretation of Dante, it is
grotesqueness.

[41] A consummate Italian scholar, the delicacy of whose taste is
questioned by no one, and whose knowledge of Dante's diction is probably
not inferior to Mr. Longfellow's, has told me that he regards the
expression as a noble and effective one, full of dignity and solemnity.

Those who have read over Dante without reading into him, and those who
have derived their impressions of his poem from M. Dore's memorable
illustrations, will here probably demur. What! Dante not grotesque! That
tunnel-shaped structure of the infernal pit; Minos passing sentence on
the damned by coiling his tail; Charon beating the lagging shades with
his oar; Antaios picking up the poets with his fingers and lowering them
in the hollow of his hand into the Ninth Circle; Satan crunching in his
monstrous jaws the arch-traitors, Judas, Brutus and Cassius; Ugolino
appeasing his famine upon the tough nape of Ruggieri; Bertrand de Born
looking (if I may be allowed the expression) at his own dissevered head;
the robbers exchanging form with serpents; the whole demoniac troop of
Malebolge,--are not all these things grotesque beyond everything else
in poetry? To us, nurtured in this scientific nineteenth century, they
doubtless seem so; and by Leigh Hunt, who had the eighteenth-century way
of appreciating other ages than his own, they were uniformly treated
as su